Marius Flothuis (1914–2001)
Sonata da camera per flauto e pianoforte 1943

Willem Andriessen (1887–1964)
Praeludium for piano 1942

Marius Flothuis
Aubade for flute solo 1944

Rudolf Escher (1912–1980)
Habanera for piano 1945

Leo Smit (1900–1943)
Sonata for flute and piano 1939-43

Hans Osieck (1910–2000)
Varsovie Accuse for piano solo 1946

Dick Kattenburg (1919–1944)
Pièce pour flûte et piano 1945

The darkness of the Second World War affected composers in different ways; this collection of works from the Netherlands shows some confronting it head-on, and others choosing musical forms that appear to look aslant at its horror – though none remained untouched by it. Smit and Kattenburg both died in the camps, just two of the 102,000 Jewish, Sinti and Roma victims from the Netherlands who are known to have been killed. Marius Flothuis wrote both his Sonata da Camera (1943) and Aubade (1944) in Nazi camps. Much of the Sonata retains a neo-Classical detachment, but the Lamento at its heart shows the composer’s pain, while the purity of the Aubade offers the hope
of a new dawn.

Begun in 1939, the three movements of Leo Smit’s powerful Sonata reflect the increasing despair of his own experience; the tragic slow movement from February 1943, shortly before he was deported.
Hans Osieck’s mazurka, Varsovie accuse (1946), marked “slow, sorrowful and sinister”, is heavy with the misery of the Warsaw Ghetto; it casts the youthful exuberance of Dick Kattenburg’s Pièce (1939) in a terrible new light, for by the time Osieck wrote this work, the 24 year old Kattenburg had been murdered in Auschwitz. Even the lush Romanticism of Andriessen’s Praeludium (1942) is marked “with sadness”, and Escher’s haunting Habanera (1945) is but a ghostly flicker of how it might have
sounded before the war.

Emily Beynon & Andrew West